Where No Food Writer Has Gone Before

In which Josh Ozersky embeds himself in one of the world's best restaurants.

Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award-winning food writer, B-list food personality, and noted polymath and deviant. The founder of Meatopia, he will answer all your questions on meat, food, food writing, relationships, restaurants, or cooking. He is also available for private tutorials.

A "trail," in restaurant lingo, is the first stage of an apprentice cook's education. Before his "stage," or internship, starts he experiences a restaurant by following a whole shift through their day, helping where needed and generally trying to stay out of the way.

Food writers, as a class, tend to only know as much about restaurant kitchens as can be glimpsed over a bowl of spaghetti. I am no exception. I fraternize widely with chefs, probably too much, but invariably from a privileged civilian perspective. I get to waltz into their kitchens, chat away, ignore everyone else, and pick dainties from passing trays without even asking. As a younger writer, I was especially oblivious in this way, and I did things I regret, like getting drunk and trying to eat pudding off a sushi knife in the basement of Commerce. That was going too far, but all food writers exist in a bubble to a greater or lesser extent. We eat the same dishes all the time, so we overvalue minor variations from one to the next, and so overpraise the kind of breezy innovation that, really, has very little to do with what makes a restaurant good or not.

I came to understand this better last week, when I trailed at Lincoln as part of the research for a profile I'm writing of Jonathan Benno, the restaurant's chef. Benno, who is quiet and intense in his direction of the restaurant, is something of a pro's pro, and I knew that it would be impossible to understand him — or any chef, really — without seeing closely how he did business. (He's not the type of chef who has a wealth of quips prepared for visiting writers.) So I arranged to trail for a day. I barely did any work at all, but I didn't act like Mayor McCheese either, and tried my best not to interfere with the machinery of service. And I got to see a lot of things as a result. One that sticks out was the roasted chicken.

The roast chicken is maybe the least interesting-sounding thing on the menu at Lincoln, after the flank steak. When it comes to you on the plate, your first thought is likely to be, "I should have gotten the hake with the brown butter zabaglione and morels and bacon and lovage," even though you have no idea what lovage is. Anyway, it's the kind of thing that you figure somebody's mom would order, and in fact many of the customers in Lincoln are people's moms, and many, many of them do order the chicken. So as a food writer going in and sitting down to eat, you might see the chicken on the plate and be inspired to comment on the way the recession has reduced great chefs to making comfort food, or how chicken has become the lingua franca of fine dining, or some other bullshit. Because both the name and the appearance of the chicken give you no idea of what is actually happening in this so-called "open kitchen." All you see behind the glass pane is Benno, expediting, with the focused expression of a man calculating his mortgage payment.

But here is what you see if you are standing in the kitchen. Ken Minkove, who mans the meat station, has two different pieces of chicken. There is a breast, or what is called an "airline breast" in the trade, which is to say a breast with the wing drumette still attached. (They call it an airline breast because they originally trimmed it that way so it would fit in airline meal trays.) The breast has been brined for 12 hours in a brine with 15 different elements in it, and the meat guy takes it and puts it skin side down in a small pan, the kind you cook an egg in. Then he takes out another pan and puts the dark meat, which looks like a regular chicken quarter, but which is in fact confited, and totally cooked, and soft enough to fall apart if you look at it wrong. While that browns, he takes a big piece of butter and some thyme and drops them into the white meat pan, where it starts to sizzle. He continuously spoons hot foaming butter over the breast so that the bone side will start cooking and get flavor as well, prior to it going into the oven, which it does next. Minkove hits a timer and then pulls the dark meat pan off the meat and leans it against the edge of the flattop range where it won't burn. A little bit later, when the timer goes off, the breast comes out of the oven, and the cook puts it on a little board and pulls out the drumette, and then squares it off, and then lets it rest. Then spigarello, which is some kind of broccoli, apparently, goes in the pan. The whole thing is plated together and then sent out. There is no sigh of relief by him, or even a pause; he has three other breasts and three other confits going at six different stages of the process, all of which he is keeping track of in his head, while at the same time cooking two kinds of steaks, lamb chops, lamb sausage, and whatever special meat was on the menu that night. It was a great feat, and one that isn't even hinted when it shows up on a plate for someone to eat half of. And it also isn't cooked by Jonathan Benno. It was cooked by some anonymous hero who was good at his job and didn't fail once while I was watching him. But he was trained by Jonathan Benno, and strained under the pressure of Benno's gaze, and internalized all of Benno's values, in much the same way Benno internalized those of Thomas Keller and Marco Canora and Daniel and all the chefs he worked under.

Cooking, it turns out, is cumulative, and larger than any one man, no matter how much his spaghetti may suggest otherwise. That's what I got out of this trail, and I will try to bear this in mind in the future. Or not. Who am I trying to kid? Anyway, I won't be so quick to dilate solely on who thought up what I ate. That, it turns out, is practically the thing that matters least about it.

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